Alex Marshall. The Caucasus under Soviet rule (2010)

Alex Marshall. The Caucasus under Soviet rule. Series: Routledge Studies in the History of Russia and Eastern Europe, vol. 12. London & New York: Routledge, 2010, XII+387 p. ISBN 9780415410120

The Caucasus is a strategically and economically important region in contemporary global affairs. Western interest in the Caucasus has grown rapidly since 1991, fuelled by the admixture of oil politics, great power rivalry, ethnic separatism and terrorism that characterizes the region. However, until now there has been little understanding of how these issues came to assume the importance they have today.

This book argues that understanding the Soviet legacy in the region is critical to analysing both the new states of the Transcaucasus and the autonomous territories of the North Caucasus. It examines the impact of Soviet rule on the Caucasus, focusing in particular on the period from 1917 to 1955. Important questions covered include how the Soviet Union created ‘nations’ out of the diverse peoples of the North Caucasus; the true nature of the 1917 revolution; the role and effects of forced migration in the region; how over time the constituent nationalities of the region came to redefine themselves; and how Islamic radicalism came to assume the importance it continues to hold today.

A cauldron of war, revolution and foreign interventions – from the British and Ottoman Turks to the oil-hungry armies of Hitler’s Third Reich – the Caucasus and the policies and actors it produced (not least Stalin, ‘Sergo’ Ordzhonikidze and Anastas Mikoian) both shaped the Soviet experiment in the twentieth century and appear set to continue to shape the geopolitics of the twenty-first. Making unprecedented use of memoirs, archives and published sources, this book is an invaluable aid for scholars, political analysts and journalists alike to understanding one of the most important borderlands of the modern world.

Alex Marshall is currently Convenor of the Scottish Centre for War Studies, University of Glasgow, UK. His other publications include The Russian General Staff and Asia, 1800–1917 (also published by Routledge).

Contents

Map 1 The Caucasus, 1917–18 … IX
Map 2 The Caucasus, 1922–28 … X
Map 3 The Caucasus in the Second World War … XI

Introduction … 1
1. The North Caucasus: between gazavat and modern revolution, 1700–1905 … 10
2. 1905–17: the first crisis of modernity in the Caucasus … 35
3. 1917–18 in the Caucasus: from world war to civil war … 51
4. 1919–20: the British and Denikin’s Caucasus … 101
5. Insurgency, corruption and the search for a new socialist order, 1920–25 … 147
6. Decossackization, demarcation, categorization: creating the Soviet Caucasus, 1920–27 … 175
7. Forging the proletariat: women, collectivization and repression, 1928–34 … 195
8. Dreams of unity, myths of power: the Caucasian diaspora … 217
9. The purges and industrial modernization: the Soviet Caucasus in the 1930s … 225
10. Dealing with ‘bandits’: war, ethnic cleansing and repression in the Soviet Caucasus, 1941–45 … 244
11. The final structural crisis of the Soviet state, 1953–91 … 272
12. Three dystopias of the post-Soviet Caucasus, 1991–2008 … 293

Afterword: the North Caucasus as a regional security complex – Vladimir Putin, pipelines and the rebuilding of the Russian federal state … 315
Notes … 325
Bibliography … 366
Index … 385